Benjamin: "Will you still love me when I have acne, wet the bed and am afraid of what's under the stairs?"

-- From "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," starring Brad Pitt

In earlier days, there was Jennifer Aniston. More recently, Angelina Jolie. Now, Brad Pitt has a new piece of arm candy.

Let us call the couple Brancy.

The 68-year-old House speaker is perhaps a bit mature for the Hollywood heartthrob. But she is very, very powerful.

"It really is an honor to have him here," Nancy Pelosi gushed with Pitt at her side for a photo op yesterday just off the Capitol Rotunda. It was, she said, "a real treat for me."

It must have been; she left a health-care forum at the White House to receive the actor.

Camera shutters clicked. Hundreds of House pages and interns stalked Pitt in the Capitol corridors before and after his tête-à-tête with Pelosi. Young women squealed. "I was 10 feet away from him! . . . Oh my God! . . . Did you see him?"

After the movie star and his entourage passed by, Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the number two Senate Republican, got on an elevator without his security detail. "Apparently I've lost my detail," he told an aide. "They've been playing scout for the girls looking for Brad Pitt."

For the two hours Pitt was at the Capitol yesterday, Congress could have declared war on Canada and nobody would have noticed. But while it was disruptive, the actor's visit to Washington could not have been better timed. His latest film, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," is about a man who ages in reverse. As it happens, this is the same way Washington grows: As time passes, the nation's politics become more and more juvenile.